SOA or Just Keeping the Lights On

A recent Gartner survey found that first time SOA adoption slowed in 2008. This is not surprising given the economic downturn, IT investments are often cut, and with the rapid adoption SOA has enjoyed the rate of growth new SOA adopters had to slow as more companies adopted SOA. Research (article below) showed that SOA adoption doubled in 2007. Since SOA has been around for several years the current SOA adopters should not really be considered early adopters and one could argue that those who have not a least started some SOA initiatives are SOA adoption laggards. The article referenced below though says that some companies have evaluated SOA and decided it was too complex or expensive to implement - at least for now. What this says to me is that many IT shops have chosen a status quo or gone into a keep the lights on state. This is disturbing but predictable behavior. At a time when IT could be innovating to create products that customers want given limited spending (e.g. Apple and Google) they are entrenching in the seemingly safe same old way of doing systems integration and the mindless maintenance of legacy systems. When IT could be saving companies money by improving business processes (e.g. reducing human labor with SOA and BPM) and unplugging expensive to maintain point-to-point, legacy integration (in favor of standards based services) they choose to go into hibernate mode. On the excuse that SOA is too expensive, I say not if you start slowly. If you have .NET or Java it's easy to start building valuable business services with no software spends. On the excuse that SOA is too complex I agree that unfortunately for many it is. Those that have for years outsourced their most challenging development efforts have developed no internal staff to the architect level - they end up with architects that are paper pushers and meeting attendees - not software engineers. And those who have just keep the lights on for the last ten years have largely driven off the architects of the once new legacy systems. Building something big and new is exciting; maintaining it for 20 years is torture. And let's not forget the impact of the ERP migrations - those projects have nothing to do with architecture. SOA is architecture and it does require architects, but it's not rocket science it only seems that way when there is an absence of architects trying to create SOA. If the "architects" designing solutions want to keep using batch extract and loads (30 year old technology) versus considering real-time, standardized services then nothing will change. But, those who just to keep the lights on spend more than 70% of IT budget on baby sitting and feeding the legacy monsters running in most IT shops - mindlessly caring for the hundreds of batch interfaces that tangle and create artificial complexly due to the sheer size, inefficiency and dependences. IT staff spends all their time monitoring, restarting and idly waiting for hiccups that occur in the middle of the night. It is no wonder that in such IT shops the CEO and CFO views IT as a cost center - I assure you that is not the case at Google and many other innovative companies. In the IT environments where 70% of the budget is spend on old technology; with the retrenchment the number for many will grow, IT is not only a cost center but a huge cost burden. Many companies are spending millions and getting little or no improvements with budget growing every year to maintain legacy systems with no discernable architecture cohesiveness. All the while architects are either not being developed, attracted or are driven away out of sheer boredom and frustration. If this sounds depressing there is one bright spot. The companies in India are doing a booming business taking over the lights on operations of static and ineffective systems. If there is no strategic value, improvements and innovations in our IT systems why not let someone baby sit them for less money? For those who want to get started with SOA on a shoestring budget take a look at
low cost SOA options. The cost of SOA is just a function of the size of the projects taken on - start small and the cost should be small. For those young and eager developers who might be stuck in a maintenance nightmare, take a small part of your day and build some modern interfaces and unplug some old batch ones. No one will miss many of the old interfaces, reports and sometimes entire systems that seem immortal as they are sucking the blood out of IT.

Gartner:
First-Time SOA Adoption Falling - The majority of large organizations are moving ahead with service-oriented architecture (SOA), but a growing number are deferring plans, according to a survey by Gartner Inc. Since the beginning of 2008, there has been a dramatic fall in the number of organizations that are planning to adopt SOA for the first time. In 2008, this was cut by more than one-half, down to 25 percent from 53 percent in 2007, while the number of organizations with no plans to adopt SOA more than doubled from 6 percent in 2007 to 16 percent in 2008. "Organizations without a clear business case for SOA and without a plan to develop or acquire the necessary skills are justified in taking a cautious approach, and delaying SOA adoption plans for the coming year," said Daniel Sholler, research vice president at Gartner. "The focus should be on creating shared services and the governance processes necessary for sharing within a reasonable domain. Larger organizations (more than 5,000 employees) are challenged to create enterprise governance." "
Use of modern programming environments is closely associated with SOA," Sholler said. "This suggests that more organizations are focusing on SOA in the context of new developments that use Java, Microsoft .NET and some of the dynamic programming languages, such as Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby. Organizations should think about options when applying SOA in legacy programming environments because skills blending the two will likely be scarce."
New Initiatives Spending Versus Keeping the Lights On - Over the last few years, business and governmental organizations of all sizes have been giving priority to spending for new initiatives. The CE survey indicates that new-initiative spending remained strong throughout 2007. Respondents in the survey reported spending, on average, 27% of their IT budgets on new initiatives."
Research: SOA Spending Set to Double in 2008 - The growth of SOA expanded by 100 percent last year and companies who did deploy spent an average of $1.4 million on SOA projects in 2007 according to a study released by AMR Research this week. According to analysts at Gartner, SOA was used in more than 50 percent of large, new applications and business processes in 2007. Gartner believes that by 2010 more than 80 percent of large, new systems will use SOA in at least some part of their design.

Yes! I am tired of execs making millions on short term decisions that ruin long term competitiveness - especially offshoring critical tasks to save a buck (supposedly) only to find your once "partner" is now your biggest and most threatening competitor.

Now is the time when companies and their IT departments are afforded the best opportunity to get ready for the next round of business agility required. We have written (see “Architecture as a Corporate Competency series
1,
2,
3, and
4”) for some time how in the financial services segment for example, the day would come when firms will actually be forced to not view IT as a cost center, but rather as a competitive advantage (or sadly for too many who have not listened, a death warrant) once they can no longer ""buy"" their customers.

Now is the time for corporate America to invest in the future by untangling all of the bolt-on M&A's done over the last decade. The alternative being extinction due to an inability to deliver “Business-Technology Convergence” needed to deliver business agility. Corporate and executive greed afforded by over leveraging third world slave labor pools, strangling IT R&D and infrastructure improvements, and under investing in “American made” for the benefit of egregious executive mismanagement for “margins” and shareholder immediate gratification, has, and will continue to bankrupt our once stalwart American corporations. Now is the time to invest in IT for competitive advantage to save Freedom from short sighted, self-serving, self-gratification caused by greed. Wake up America; invest in your infrastructure before it's too late!

Regards, Mark "

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eroch

September 19, 2017 05:07 PM

Well said - and they lose competitive advantage to those investing in technology and the business deteriorates over time.

I'm not sure when the Gartner survey was done, but I wouldn't necessarily ascribe the slowed adoption of SOA to the economic downturn which has really only been affecting budgets in the last couple of months. Instead slowing SOA adoption is more related to lack of a business case and/or lack of SOA expertise...which are linked
in my view.

And I totally agree with your comments on the ""Architecture Bureaucrats""...these represent organizations who outsourced any architectural expertise and therefore have no capability to build an SOA business case or SOA strategy.

There is a clear ""downward spiral"" here:

step 1: company doesn't value IT
step 2: company views IT as cost centre
step 3: company outsources IT to remove cost
step 4: company loses any IT/architecture expertise
step 5: company beholden to external interests (keeping the lights on)
step 6: company doesn't get any value from IT
goto step 1;

Once a company gets into this mode there is probably nothing that can be done.